Reuters historical calendar - October 26

London, Oct 25 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 26 since 1900: 1905 - Revolutionary Russian workers in St Petersburg formed the first Soviet, or workers' assembly, in a brief uprising.

1944 - In World War Two, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines ended with victory for the United States.

1951 - Winston Churchill was appointed British prime minister for a second time following the Conservative party's narrow victory in elections.

1955 - South Vietnam was proclaimed a republic by Ngo Dinh Diem, who declared himself president.

1956 - A statute was signed setting up the International Atomic Energy Agency.

1962 - During the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent a note to US President John F Kennedy offering to withdraw his missiles from Cuba if the US withdrew its bases from Turkey. The offer was formally rejected.

1972 - Igor Sikorsky, Russian inventor of the first successful helicopter, died in the United States.

1979 - South Korean President Park Chung-hee was shot and killed by his intelligence chief.

1994 - Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in a ceremony at their border attended by US President Bill Clinton.

1995 - Radical Palestinian leader Fathi Shqaqi was killed in Malta by unknown assailants.

1997 - Residents of the breakaway Indian Ocean island of Anjouan voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros.

2000 - An Ilyushin-18 aircraft ploughed into a mountain in ex-Soviet Georgia, killing more than 80 people.

2001 - Abdul Haq, veteran Afghan opposition commander, is captured and executed by Taliban troops while he is on a mission inside Afghanistan to gather support for a peace plan.

2001 - President Vladimir Putin granted Russians the right to own land, about two percent of Russia's 1.7 billion hectares, for the first time overturning a Soviet-era ban.

2002 - 129 of a total 750 hostages were killed when Russian special forces stormed a Moscow theatre at dawn to end a three-day siege by Chechen rebels. Only two died of gunshot wounds, the rest of gas poisoning. 41 guerrillas were also killed.

2004 - The Israeli parliament approved Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in 2005. Israel completed its troop withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005.

REUTERS SAM VV1132